Did Punjab Woman Give Birth To 6 Babies? Viral Video Fact-Checked

A video claiming to show that a woman in Punjab has given birth to six babies - four boys and two girls - is gaining traction on social media. The shows six women coming out of the labour room of a hospital carrying the babies and then line up with all six of them for a picture-perfect moment. The visual, as usual, evoked positive emotions online and people stated posting congratulatory comment for the woman. But some curious users questioned the incident and sought news reports to confirm it.

The video has close to one lakh likes and over 2,400 comments on Instagram. However, the entire story appears to be fake, as pointed out by some users.

One user points out that the video is not from Punjab and has been created by using AI-generated photos and merging videos from elsewhere. "This photo has gone viral on the internet earlier with various claims, like the same photo was used when a woman (Komal) in Gujranwala, Pakistan gave birth to 5 children," the user said in the comment.

It also said that such posts are shared to get more likes and views on social media pages, a common deceptive and manipulative strategy on social media called engagement farming.

Another user raised doubt with this comment: "Imagine the size of this woman's stomach region carrying 6 babies at once, with an average baby weight of 2.5 kgs approximate. That's 15 kgs of distribution of bones/muscles & blood just in stomach region."

Some users also referred to the image used as thumb that shows the six babies with their supposed mother, claiming it looks like AI generated.

The post appears to build on an "extremely rare" case of the birth of sextuplets in Pakistan. The incident occurred in Rawalpindi where a woman named Zeenat Waheed gave birth to four boys and one girl, as reported by Dawn.

The outlets said the six children were healthy with no complications.

In 2020, a 23-year-old woman gave birth to sextuplets in Madhya Pradesh's Sheopur district, but two of them died shortly after.

The babies were born prematurely and underweight over a span of 35 minutes, news agency PTI quoted Sheopur District Hospital Civil Surgeon Dr RB Goyal as saying.

Pregnancies involving three or more foetuses are extremely rare. They are also associated with a higher risk of complications than single pregnancies. However, multiple births have become more common in recent years because more people are using fertility drugs and procedures, such as IVF, to help conceive a baby. Fertility drugs increase the chances of a multiple pregnancy because these medicines stimulate the ovaries to produce many eggs.